We often say that going on mission to a new country is, for the one going, like a new birth. Just like in a relationship with a person, the new culture of the people to whom we are sent, with all of its history, must find space and grow in us in time. It is not an automatic process: we know well that in order to love, we must work hard, which involves time and effort. It is for this reason that, for the first five months since my arrival to our mission in Nairobi, my superiors proposed to me to dedicate myself almost exclusively to the study of Swahili that, together with English, is the national language of Kenya. And so, Sr. Eleonora and I set out for Tanzania for an intensive course lasting three months.
Every day, starting at 8 in the morning, we would leave our residence, walking for a half hour along the highway, until we arrived at the language school. Here, our teacher, Faith, a young woman originally from Tanzania, would be waiting for us with a huge smile in the classroom: a table surrounded by three walls that opened into a beautiful garden full of flowers, trees and monkeys. Around the table, thanks to many hours of work, we realized that studying a language is much more than a technical capability to acquire: it is encountering a new world, and entering into it. For example, Swahili does not have a word for “have” but instead, expresses the concept of possession saying “being with.” Then, there are the numerous and important proverbs, many of which express a strong sense of being a people: umoja ni nguvu (“unity is strength”), mtu ni watu (“a person is his people”). These are subtle notions that, however, allow one to glimpse the core of a culture that, at its roots, does not put the accent on the individual.
The faith of life were transmitted in this way, through the telling of stories.
We also saw clearly from the relationship with our teacher that giving weight to language facilitates reciprocal knowledge and favors friendship. At a certain point, during the lessons, after having already asked us many questions about our life and on the Church, with the excuse of making us practice speaking in Swahili, Faith asked us to tell her a story from the Bible. With the extremely limited command of the language I had already gained, I sought with all of my might to tell the story of Esther, one of my favorite accounts. It took me almost an hour to sum up only three pages! Eleonora did the same and told the Annunciation from the Gospel of Luke. During this difficult attempt, something unexpected happened: Faith followed our stories with total attention and at the end asked us a series of questions probing deeper into what we had shared. When we had already gone over the time we had for the lesson by quite a bit, she said to us decisively: “Tomorrow, I want two more stories!”
I was blown away by the power of the instrument of the story, reflecting also on the fact that for the first Christians, and for ancient cultures in general, the faith and the truth of life were transmitted in this way, through the telling of stories. God too chose to communicate Himself through the word and today wants to use our voices to continue to announce His message of salvation in every language, to all of the peoples of the earth.
